The present invention relates to a method for determining speech, or voice, activity in a signal segment of an audio signal, the result of whether speech activity is present in the observed signal segment depending both on the spectral and on the temporal stationarity of the signal segment and/or on preceding signal segments.
In the domain of speech transmission and in the field of digital signal and speech storage, the use of special digital coding methods for data compression purposes is widespread and mandatory because of the high data volume and the limited transmission capacities. A method which is particularly suitable for the transmission of speech is the Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) method which is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,133,976. In this method, the speech signal is encoded and transmitted in small temporal segments (“speech frames”, “frames”, “temporal section”, “temporal segment”) having a length of about 5 ms to 50 ms each. Each of these temporal segments or frames is not represented exactly but only by an approximation of the actual signal shape. In this context, the approximation describing the signal segment is essentially obtained from three components which are used to reconstruct the signal on the decoder side: Firstly, a filter approximately describing the spectral structure of the respective signal section; secondly, a so-called “excitation signal” which is filtered by this filter; and thirdly, an amplification factor (gain) by which the excitation signal is multiplied prior to filtering. The amplification factor is responsible for the loudness of the respective segment of the reconstructed signal. The result of this filtering then represents the approximation of the signal portion to be transmitted. The information on the filter settings and the information on the excitation signal to be used and on the scaling (gain) thereof which describes the volume must be transmitted for each segment. Generally, these parameters are obtained from different code books which are available to the encoder and to the decoder in identical copies so that only the number of the most suitable code book entries has to be transmitted for reconstruction. Thus, when coding a speech signal, these most suitable code book entries are to be determined for each segment, searching all relevant code book entries in all relevant combinations, and selecting the entries which yield the smallest deviation from the original signal in terms of a useful distance measure.
There exist different methods for optimizing the structure of the code books (for example, multiple stages, linear prediction on the basis of the preceding values, specific distance measures, optimized search methods, etc.). Moreover, there are different methods describing the structure and the search method for determining the excitation vectors.
Frequently, the task arises to classify the character of the signal located in the present frame to allow determination of the coding details, for example, of the code books to be used, etc. In this context, a so-called “voice activity decision” (voice activity detection, VAD) is frequently made as well, which indicates whether or not the currently present signal section contains a speech segment. A correct decision of this type must also be made when background noises are present, which makes the classification more difficult.